Joyce Lovelace with her husband Judge Eddie C. Lovelace. Eddie Lovelace died in September after contracting fungal meningitis. / Submitted

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The Tennessean

Joyce Lovelace didn’t seek the spotlight, but when she was invited to testify during the congressional hearings on the deadly fungal meningitis outbreak, the decision to accept came quickly.

“It just seemed the right thing to do,” said Lovelace, whose husband of 55 years, Judge Eddie C. Lovelace, was killed by fungal meningitis in September after being exposed to tainted steroid injections in Nashville.

“I just hope to call attention to the negligence, the carelessness, the incompetence that … has taken my husband’s life, as well as a lot of other people,” Lovelace said.

Lovelace, who lives in Albany, Ky., is heading to the congressional hearings along with others affected by the outbreak in Tennsessee in hopes of holding the New England Compounding Center, which shipped thousands of vials of tainted drugs across the country, accountable. The center’s drugs have sickened 81 people who received doses in Tennessee, killing 13 of them.

“Someone is cutting corners or cutting costs, and it’s costing people their lives,” Lovelace said. “I want (someone) to regulate these things.”

Lawyer Mark P. Chalos with the firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein is going to Washington, D.C., with another attorney and a client whose mother is still in the hospital after five weeks of treatment for fungal meningitis.

The group was invited to attend by a member of Congress, Chalos said. His firm represents several affected families across the country, including at least four in Tennessee.

“Our clients stand ready to help in any way to keep this from happening to any other family in the future,” Chalos said.

Lovelace said the pall of her husband’s death still hangs over her grieving family.

“This has been a useless waste of a valuable human’s life,” she said. “We’re grieving, but we’re angry … and we just want to see something done.”